Vitamin D deficiency and Covid-19 mortality [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://borsche.de/res/Vitamin_D_Essentials_EN.pdf <comment><USER2> I've mentioned this before, but my wife is a parathyroid surgeon (parathyroids are the glands that regulate the calcium in your neck) and would beg you to PLEASE monitor your calcium levels if you are supplementing with Vitamin D. She often sees patients on high doses of Vitamin D from well intentioned doctors, but with out of whack calcium levels because of it, and the patients can be very sick without understanding why. Often their doctors don't understand the processes either which is why they end up with her. I'll have her write a blog post about it at some point, but it is a real risk with possible severe long term consequences and she sees it a lot more often these days. She is getting her blog kicked off here (just yesterday actually) [https://devaboone.com](https://devaboone.com) if you want to follow along.

<comment><USER3> Would you mind elaborating on what you mean by "wacky" levels? I can't tell from your comment if that means high or low. Asking as a Vitamin D supplement user who uses 2-3k IU a day

<comment><USER4> Hi, I'm the wife. High dose Vitamin D can cause elevated calcium levels (meaning over 10.0 mg/dl for adults over 40, it can be a little higher for younger adults). I usually don't see that occur with doses at 2-3 K IU daily. You can also check your Vitamin D 25-OH levels (the level that will be done if you just get a standard "Vitamin D level") and these should be in a reasonable range. What constitutes reasonable may be debatable, but in general I do not see elevated calcium levels with Vitamin D levels that are under 50 ng/ml (unless the person has parathyroid disease, another topic). The "toxic" range for Vitamin D is usually set to 100, but this is well over where most people should be. Toxicity with regard to Vitamin D means high calcium - that is the toxic effect. And I have seen this toxic effect occur with Vit D levels in the 50s.

<comment><USER5> Would you still consider 5,000 IU of Vitamin D per day safe as far as these calcium issues go?

I had a doctor tell me to take that dose for at least a few months a few years ago after low levels in my bloodwork during the winter. But I've never known if I should lower the dose to take on a continuing basis or adjust during the summer when I get a little more sun (but I still work in an office/at home so spend a lot of time indoors, especially now).

<comment><USER4> I do see people get high calcium levels after being on this dose for years. But not always. You may be able to handle that dose. If you are getting "routine" labs done, then there is likely a calcium level in there. If your calcium is normal (under 10.0 mg/dl for adults over 40, younger adults can be a little higher), then your Vitamin D dose is ok... but I would still recommend coming down a bit on that dose. It is a high dose, and Vit D builds up in your body, since it is a fat soluble vitamin.

<comment><USER6> just checked my "Vitamin D, 25 OH" test:

result: 13.3 ng/ml, normal range: 25.0 - 80.0 ng/ml

I'm taking Vitamin D3 Max 125MCG per day, is this "overdose"?

Thanks,

<comment><USER7> Since the doc hasn't replied to this question (yet), your Vit D levels are low enough to warrant supplementation. In my country it is common to supplement with 60K IU once a week, for 8 weeks, before moving to a maintenance dosage of 60k once a month. That's almost 10k IU/day during the loading phase. You're at 5k IU/ day, so should be fine. In comparison, a fair skinned person at the beach on a sunny day will make over 10k IU of D3.

<comment><USER6> Thank you!!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although this is a notable finding it's important to remember that it doesn't lead to the conclusion that supplementing vitamin D will be very beneficial here. When vitamin D is produced in the body naturally via exposure to sunlight there's a huge amount of other things that occur as well, and we don't have a ton of good science to back up if curing a vitamin D deficiency via supplementation of pure vitamin D is really nearly the same as getting it naturally, which is a common problem for supplementing things and nutritional science and epidemiology in general.

The extent that covid harms those that are metabolically unfit in many different ways much more than those that are perfectly healthy is still pretty under-discussed imo though, and this is yet another good data point in favor of it, even if Vitamin D is much more of a different proxy than some of the other large correlations we see with covid mortality.

<comment><USER9> In Finland we put Vitamin D in milk that's sold on normal shops. And taking a supplement is heavily recommended.

Though this is mostly because for 6 months of a year one simply cannot get it the natural way (too cold and sun is too low). And thanks to this we don't have much deficiency, long time ago we used to have.

Not saying it means it would help with covid. But the supplements definitely help with deficiency in a way that does cure/prevent rickets.

<comment><USER10> >In Finland we put Vitamin D in milk that's sold on normal shops.

I'd wager it's the same in all the Nordic countries, at least it's the same here in Sweden.

A couple a months ago when I spoke to my dad, he told me he had a checkup because he had been unusually tired, turned out that the only thing the testing showed was that he had d-vitamin deficiency.

What surprised me is that he was given prescription d-vitamins, since you can buy them anywhere without prescription.

<comment><USER11> You can get larger doses of vitamin D in one pill as a prescription. Like 20000 IU once every week or two instead of daily.

Also there is vitamin D2 and D3. The normal stuff you take is called D2. The D3 is made by the kidneys from converting D2. But those with certain diseases, the kidneys don't do the conversion so they provide vitamin D3 in the form called calcitriol. Its something I need to take due to my kidney failure.

<comment><USER12> At least in the UK, it's pretty easy to get D3 over the counter too. I've been buying D3 drops off of Amazon.

<comment><USER11> Looks like I misunderstood it. Calcitriol is different from D3. Normally your body converts D3 to calcitriol but those with certain diseases will not get it converted.

Calcitriol is actually the most confusing of my medications to manage since the dosage needs to be adjusted based on monthly blood tests. Things like amount of sun exposure can swing my numbers around. And it interacts with so many blood test numbers like PTH, phosphorus and calcium levels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article is (badly) written by un-qualified authors (two software developers). This would be enough to raise at least a few red flags on the conclusions drawn here. Has it even been peer reviewed? From a first look, there no way this work would have been published by any reputable journal.

If there is any truth in what the authors claim, the best they could do is to work with field experts and/or submit their findings to a reputable journal for review and publishing. Someone's health might be on the line following pseudo-scientific works.

<comment><USER14> > This article is (badly) written by un-qualified authors (two software > developers)

Indeed the first sentence talks about "corona deaths." No qualified medical professional would write that in a paper.

<comment><USER15> Is English their first language? .de and all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Vitamin D has been endlessly promoted as a treatment for many diseases due to evidence from observational studies, but hundreds of millions of dollars in randomized controlled trials have never demonstrated it to be effective for any disease except rickets.

There was just a large trial published in JAMA [1] examining its effectiveness for depression given solid observational data. It was not at all effective.

The reason that Vitamin D is associated with many diseases but is not causative for anything is that Vitamin D level is highly correlated with other metrics of health such as socioeconomic status, active lifestyle, nutritional sufficiency, etc.

We are wasting our time and money looking at Vitamin D again and again and again.

1\. [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/27689...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article- abstract/2768978)

<comment><USER17> This study used a tiny amount of Vitamin D (2,00IU/day) which is absolutely not enough Vitamin D to have any affect on someone who is deficient. Going outside in a swimsuit produces 10,000+IU equivalent. We evolved nude, outdoors.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3356951/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3356951/)

<comment><USER18> It's not a tiny amount, probably about 40% of what most adults should be getting optimally, and significantly better than having almost no intake, which is the case for a lot of people who rarely go outside and don't eat any fatty fish.

<comment><USER17> That's fair. The RDA at 400 is tiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is not surprising at all that Covid-19 matches what we already know about Vitamin D and Influenza. There are consequences for radically altering the environment in which humans evolved. We were nude outdoors and now we are clothed and indoors. When we do briefly go outside, we are all conditioned to slather on sunscreen, which blocks all Vitamin D generation.

Why do people tend to get sick in the wintertime and not the summer?

[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16959053/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16959053/)

<comment><USER19> Humans have being wearing clothes for about 170,000 years, indoors and outdoors, long enough for a evolutionary response. Along with fire, clothing is one of our great inventions and allows humans to live in colder climates than we could otherwise. We have, along with other creatures like lice, been evolving since we started wearing clothes.

But why do people get more sick in the winter, when they are forced into close proximity with other people, making illness easier to spread, rather than the summer, when people are outdoors more, and can do things like walk to work in the warm summer sun rather than take the bus in the cold winter rain and snow? Stated differently, we naturally do more social distancing in the summer.

<comment><USER17> Sure, there has been evolution. Like the adaptation of white skin for humans in northern latitudes. Why was it so important to evolve pale skin for humans living in high latitudes?

Social distancing in summer as a reason why people don't get sick is an interesting theory, any studies that support it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks like this has been posted a lot on HN recently [0]. Previous Vitamin D & Covid-19 discussions that garnered some comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23023703](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23023703)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463713](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22463713)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23119949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23119949)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23390264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23390264)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23349962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23349962)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23167802](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23167802)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23188675](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23188675)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23083619](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23083619)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22600685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22600685)

[0] [https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=true&query=vitamin%20d%20covid&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER21> People need to be really careful when sharing papers like these and repeating their conclusions without the appropriate disclaimers. That's always the case, and _especially_ during a time when so many people are unable to consult their doctors and resorting to self-medicating based on hearsay and overconfidence in their own ability to interpret scientific papers.

To be clear, I'm not saying vitamin D deficiency in relation to Covid mortality isn't a valid line of inquiry for the health community to take their research in. But from what I can tell, this is far outside the authors' areas of expertise.

I'd say this kind of thing in particular has the potentially to be even more dangerous than irresponsibly discussing the effects of something like hydroxychloroquine, because so many people don't realize how dangerous vitamins and other such 'natural' remedies can be when taken without the supervision of a medical professional.

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting but a there's a decent chance of correlation not causation. Unhealthy people and people over 65 (i.e. those most susceptible to serious COVID complications) are the same group that are most likely to be Vitamin D deficient. The primary source of Vitamin D is sunlight. People over 65 tend to stay indoors, etc. People with darker skin are also more prone to D deficiency due to increased melanin, but also have higher rates of obesity, more likely to suffer from diabetes, are more likely to live in cramped conditions, etc.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3447083/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3447083/) [https://www.cantonmercy.org/healthchat/42-percent-of- america...](https://www.cantonmercy.org/healthchat/42-percent-of-americans- are-vitamin-d-deficient/) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6075634/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6075634/)

<comment><USER23> From the paper:

> _After correction for age, sex and previous illnesses,_ the risk of death is > 10 times higher for people with vitamin D deficiency.

That said, it could still be correlative and not causative with some different underlying health issue.

<comment><USER24> > That said, it could still be correlative and not causative with some > different underlying health issue.

On the other hand, maybe Vitamin D deficiency is the cause or one the causes of those underlying health issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This isn't the first set of studies on Vitamin D3 and COVID-19, and very happy more is coming out that is supportive: [http://agingbiotech.info/vitamindcovid19/](http://agingbiotech.info/vitamindcovid19/)

Per Nicholas Taleb this is "optionality", very low risk and potentially very high reward.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Pending results of such trials, it would seem uncontroversial to enthusiastically promote efforts to achieve reference nutrient intakes of vitamin D, which range from 400 IU/day in the UK to 600–800 IU/day in the USA. These are predicated on benefits of vitamin D for bone and muscle health, but there is a chance that their implementation might also reduce the impact of COVID-19 in populations where vitamin D deficiency is prevalent; there is nothing to lose from their implementation, and potentially much to gain."

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587\(20\)30268-0/fulltext)

</comment><comment><USER27> > The rapid increase of vitamin D levels in covid-19 infected patients with > vitamin D deficiency (< 30ng/ml), as well as vitamin D supplementation for > doctors, nursing staff and risk patients to a healthy blood level of > 40-50ng/ml, is - in the authors' view - the only conceivable solution to > effectively contain the corona pandemic.

Research paper warning alarm sounding here.

<comment><USER28> I don't know if this should really be considered a "research paper" even.

<comment><USER29> This is a pretty poor article on an interesting topic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Vitamin D deficiency causes a 10 times higher death rate in Covid-19 > patients according to recent studies.

This is a hugely overstated conclusion - and none of the studies presented are able to make causal claims to back this up. This is a load of malarkey.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been very frustrated in my attempts to raise this issue with the local health department where I live. I was brushed aside, and was told "correlation does not imply causation". I doubt that the person on the phone wanted to get into a conversation about dynamical systems or nonlinear data analysis, so I didn't even go there.

Instead I sent a letter full of references to published research, and citing other letters (peer reviewed) urging public health officials to recommend safe levels of supplementation. I received 0 engagement. I should really send the letter every day until someone responds.

Aside from all of the promising anecdotal evidence and population studies, there is plenty of established theory to understand just how Vitamin D might help lessen the load of Covid-19. Decades of published, reviewed research have shown that Vitamin D:

\- helps regulate calcium metabolism and ionization... disregulated calcium levels are also linked to poor covid outcomes

\- downregulates some of the same inflammatory cytokines involved in the positive feedback loops seen in bad covid cases

\- directly regulates the expression of ACE-2 genes

\- regulates the renin-angiotensin system

\- regulates circadian rhythm

Other supplements that work with Vitamin D to help regulate calcium metabolism and ionization are also promising, including K2 and magnesium.

[https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.01.20112334v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.01.20112334v2)

A friend of mine who's a doctor also told me that a lot of people with bad covid outcomes just have general electrolyte imbalances. To what degree is this pandemic just a manifestation of basic malnutrition on a massive scale?

At this point, I've come to the conclusion that there is a systemic conflict of interest in many health systems around the world. It's most blatant in the US. Specifically: It seems that there are certain "neo-Malthusian" individuals high up in the chains of command who simply have no interest in implementing low risk, low cost measures that prevent loss of life, and instead use their power to further cater to the already privileged groups of people they deem fit for life. This goes beyond covid-19.

<comment><USER32> A simpler explanation is profit motive; it doesn't 'pay' to promote free/low cost alternatives. Most of western medicine is geared this way, imo.

<comment><USER31> I agree, and don't believe your explanation is all that different from mine. Market driven medicine implicitly favors people who for whatever reason find themselves in the position to pay for care, and slowly but surely culls those who aren't.

People with the power to regulate health care "markets", to shape the incentive structures and make them less overtly biased in favor of wealthy people, sometimes they do this and sometimes they don't. Currently, at least in the US, in the midst of this unfolding crisis, the power balance seems skewed toward the "let's take a violent trek toward 'herd immunity' as soon as possible" decision makers, many of whom are more or less blatantly eugenic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This conclusion (10x higher mortality if deficient in Vitamin D) is rather significant. How trustworthy is this source?

<comment><USER34> From a technical writing style perspective, the thing going against this paper is the folksy way of writing. It also includes things called weasel words, such as saying very young doctor, versus young doctor, or even just doctor.

The results are compelling, and I suppose it would not hurt to take a prophylaxis of vitamin D (5,000 units per the article?) as compared to a prophylaxis of something else, such as hydroxychloroquine (or Lysol!)

<comment><USER35> People in my doctor friend's hospital taking HCQ got arrhythmias at a higher rate and often didn't get better. It is not a miracle cure and is quite dangerous in the alleged "treatment ranges".

I am a bit stunned that people are still going on about HCQ after all this time and the many trials. I feel this comment by a virologist is the key to understanding why it got so hyped and is not working:

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220301145?via%3Dihub) (May 2020)

"Highlights

• In vitro data suggest that chloroquine inhibits SARS Cov-2 replication. • In past research, chloroquine has shown in vitro activity against many different viruses, but no benefit in animal models. • Chloroquine has been proposed several times for the treatment of acute viral diseases in humans without success. • The outcomes of some current clinical trials of chloroquine in China have been announced, without access to the data. • Peer review of the results and an independent assessment of the potential benefit for patients are essential."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> As I wrote at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23025501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23025501) :

There is an app I've been using to track my Vitamin D for a few years now: [http://dminder.ontometrics.com](http://dminder.ontometrics.com)

(Not affiliated with the app, just happy with it.) It tells you the sun angle, peak hour of the day, and maximum time you should be in that day's sun based on your skin type, to avoid getting burnt while still getting enough D.

Be careful though - you might get a little OCD about Vitamin D tracking with this app. I did, and mainly use it now for checking how long it is safe to stay outdoors. (Instead of full blown tracking.)

</comment><comment><USER37> Is this a peer-reviewed finding? As someone without expertise in the area how do I evaluate its credibility?

<comment><USER38> How do you evaluate the credibility of anything in life? I'm not being facetious, it's a question I've been asking myself a lot lately after making decisions based on the information from a medical doctor, who, turns out, was not competent to make certain affirmations.

<comment><USER39> I have been asking that too.

What steps should I take to verify information without becoming an expert in the field?

What about more nuanced political topics?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I heard about this just the other day on an episode of the Radiolab podcast, if you're interested in listening to a nice narration to complement the article: [https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/invis...](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/invisible- allies)

</comment><comment><USER41> My wife just had a Vitamin D test which came at 15ng/mL, so we are chuckling right now that she is 100% going to die if she gets COVID.

Dark humor aside, that is one hell of a chart. Really helps explain the huge drop in death rate over the summer.

I must say it's a bit of a missed opportunity to build up herd immunity while the sun is shining here in the northern hemisphere.

</comment><comment><USER42> Supplementing with vitamin D should be easy enough to test. Given that most people get their necessary vitamin D by going outside, couldn't the presence/lack of this vitamin be an indicator of other lifestyle choices that may affect the person's ability to fight off the disease?

<comment><USER28> Sure, but a bigger confounder is probably that vitamin D deficiency is associated with metabolic syndrome, CKD, obesity, diabetes, etc. These may be, for some people, indicative of lifestyle choices as well, but those choices are, I'd guess, not the direct cause of a person's inability to survive the disease.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Everyone should try a Vitamin D cycle if only to see if makes a big difference in daily life, especially if you live in area with sad winters. It's one of the few supplements that dramatically improves mood for those deficient or sensitive to large doses.

<comment> y-c-o-m-b I can provide my anecdote. I live near Portland, OR and been taking 5000IU of Vitamin D for years. It doesn't do anything to help with seasonal sadness. Neither do those "sun lamps". The only thing I've found helpful (although short-lived) for that is literally leaving the state for a week to somewhere warmer; like Hawaii or San Diego. The sadness comes back shortly after returning though, and sometimes even worse than before. It seems to me that treating seasonal depression is more complicated than simply taking medication or sitting in front of a lamp.

<comment><USER44> Yeah, it would be nice to be able to replicate a warmer and sunnier climate indoors during the winter.

Another thing you can try is to use red to near infrared light which has been shown to affect the mitochondrial electron transport chain. I read "Brain Photobiomodulation Therapy: A Narrative Review" a couple of days ago which is pretty interesting.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6041198/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6041198/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Dr. John Campbell has a lot of videos about vitamin D and covid-19 -- here is one from last week [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv4iINxf4IM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv4iINxf4IM)

</comment><comment><USER46> "average age group of the 20 patients" == 60 years old

Is 20 a high enough sample size for any meaningful conclusion from a study like this?

<comment><USER47> The Harvard Gazette: Study confirms vitamin D protects against colds and flu

[https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/02/study- confirm...](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/02/study-confirms- vitamin-d-protects-against-cold-and-flu/)

University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus: Vitamin D reduces respiratory infections

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161116103005.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/11/161116103005.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> the problem with vitamin D is there's a lot of confounders that D is a proxy for, particularly met-syn and old age, so until there's actual mechanistic descriptions for how D inhibits covid severity, i'm remaining cautiously- optimistic-bordering-on-skeptical about its curative powers.

</comment><comment><USER49> Would it be reasonable to hypothesize that, through lack of sun exposure and ensuing vitamin D deficiencies, lockdowns kill more people than they save? (that is, the increase in mortality would more than overcome the decrease in cases)

We cannot know for sure of course, but is it unreasonable to even consider?

<comment><USER50> My state started locking down early, but at no time were people not allowed to go outside. Closing bars seems unlikely to contribute to vitamin D deficiency, for example.

<comment><USER49> But strong lockdowns in which you're not allowed to walk outside unless you have a good reason happened in a lot of countries.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I think the findings are good and interesting but I wish we could dodge the politicized angle of this:

"A lockdown would then be just as unnecessary as the justified fear of our elderly fellow citizens and the risk groups, which imposes an abnormal life on all of us."

</comment><comment><USER52> I've been maintaining a complete-ish repository of vitamin D covid research here:

[https://github.com/GShotwell/vitamin_d_covid](https://github.com/GShotwell/vitamin_d_covid)

</comment><comment><USER53> Something to consider when sunlight works and Vit D supplementation does not is how well your digestive tract is absorbing nutrients. Fast, food diaries, observe reactions especially on the skin.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've heard people talk in other offline conversations about COVID-19 induced hyper-coagulability. How much did that play a role in these cases?

</comment><comment><USER55> If this work truly is very important, you will read about it from a reputable journal which properly vets this information. This isn't peer reviewed, it's just a website's PDF, there is no way to verify anything put onto this PDF.

<comment><USER56> This reputable enough for you?

[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587\(20\)30268-0/fulltext)

<comment><USER55> I don't understand. The authors for your link are "Adrian R Martineau, Nita G Forouhi". The authors for the PDF of this thread are "Lorenz Borsche / Dr. Bernd Glauner".Were you trying to say others in the field are doing similar work?

My point above was that posting a PDF online is not good enough in scientific circles. The charts themselves have a number of issues which I'd ask the authors, I don't know if they've properly adjusted for the risk factors and I'm not sure I agree with their choice of denominators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'm a simple person. I see two y or x axis on the same plot and I cast doubt.</comment>


Circumventing the JVM's Bytecode Verifier - half-kh-hacker https://anthony.som.codes/blog/2019-12-30-jvm-hackery-noverify/ <comment><AUTHOR> Way back when I was messing with Android reverse engineering, there were already a number of obfuscation/protection systems which screwed with Dalvik VM internals. One particularly memorable one had a native library, written using a completely incompatible ARM ABI (using the stack pointer as a normal register, a different register for stack-like operations in the opposite direction, using random registers and stack slots for arguments, etc.), whose only job it was to patch the crap out of the Dalvik VM so it would load their custom obfuscated VM bytecode. The main issue (and the reason this kind of obfuscation seems to have gotten less popular) was that it depended extremely heavily on Dalvik internal structure offsets, and had a massive table of version-specific offsets and patch code which presumably became unmaintainable with all the extant versions of Android.

Anyway, it's fun to look at ways to obfuscate bytecode. It's far too easy to decompile unobfuscated Java code to pretty much perfect source code these days (same goes for any .NET code) - you really do need a little bit of obfuscation to prevent people from trivially stealing your code.

<comment><USER2> I've heard similar tales about the JRE as well. Cross compilers and obfuscators found many, many patterns that the spec 'allowed' but the runtime did not.

I think the biggest tricks I know of in obfuscators is abuse of overloading (calling all functions 'a' until you run into a collision on argument types, then call those methods 'b'), which decompiled is still gibberish to most of us. The nastiest one I saw was that someone realized that keywords and symbols are reserved in Java but not in the JVM. So they started naming things "int" or "{".

I wouldn't be surprised if that's now old hat for decompilers though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah calling everything "a" is pretty much the only thing Proguard (the default Android obfuscator) really does that impacts reverse engineering in any way. Most reverse engineers I know working with Android already have good tools to deal with this (interactive renaming, very similar to refactor renaming, works wonders; as does the fact that most Android code leaves class and sometimes method names intact in logging and debug infrastructure!).

Renaming classes and methods into annoying names is something I see with .NET much more frequently - one obfuscator I've seen basically uses different mixes of Unicode spaces to name everything which is pretty cute. Unfortunately most of these techniques are easy to work around as a reverse engineer.

<comment><USER3> Which are the best tools to reverse engineer Android Apps?

For me jd-gui was not working very well, it was not able to decompile many long methods and just threw errors. Is there any actively developed JAR or dalvik decompiler?

<comment><AUTHOR> I used a mix of apktool (reading raw Smali code) and jd-gui for a while, but recently transitioned mostly to using JADX: [https://github.com/skylot/jadx](https://github.com/skylot/jadx)

JADX is really nice - there's a decent GUI, and it also supports exporting the whole thing as an Android Studio project so you can directly take advantage of the refactor tools there for more deobfuscation. It also has a smarter decompiler than JD as it's specialized to go straight from dex to Java (JD makes a trip through the classic JVM class format, which loses some nuance of dex).

Of course, many of the apps I'm taking apart have native components, for which I use GHIDRA and IDA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a bit over my head and I'm out of the JVM world now but I found it all very interesting and well written. One small thing I'd suggest is to change how footnotes are done. I was very confused when I hit the first footnote "1" but there was no title text and it wasn't a link so I just scrolled to the bottom of the article and saw "1\. Employing this technique seems to work on Windows and Linux..." and I was very confused as that had nothing to do with "three million devices.". The "1: n = 3,000,000; ..." in the next paragraph didn't register when reading through. I thought it might be a "pull quote"-type thing that would be explained below. There are about a million ways to accomplish footnotes so I won't try and say which is best but some color difference (both footnote number and then the text for the footnote) might be helpful in making it more obvious and seems like an easy change.

Again, great article and I really don't meant to nitpick, the footnotes just confused me a little.

</comment><comment><USER5> A must-read for anyone implementing security on a language specific VM or runtime environment, in the future...

<comment><USER6> TL;DR if you give people a RW primitive out of the gate you're going to have a bad time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You explained the concept like a senior with tens of years of experience. First year at university... dang. Respect.

<comment> half-kh-hacker To be fair, this is three-and-a-bit years of experience in this area, so it's not like I've learned this in my eight weeks of lectures...</comment></comment>


The Secret Shame of an Unacquired Tech Worker - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/04/secret-shame-of-an-unacquired-techie.html <comment><USER7> The article really tries to make this about her gender when on the face of it it's about her role. "she had been paid a salary of $60,000, half what her male colleagues made" doesn't sound as bad when stated as "the designer had been paid a salary of $60,000, half what her engineering colleagues made".

I'm sure I'd feel pretty bad too if I was in her place. I hope she can get through it and learn and grow from the experience.

<comment><USER8> The average salary for a UX designer in Mountain View is 7% less than an engineer.

[http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=User+experience+designer&l1=...](http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=User+experience+designer&l1=Mountain+view%2C+ca&q2=Software+engineer&l2=Mountain+view%2C+ca&tm=1)

<comment><USER9> Depends tremendously on experience level, whether or not the designer can implement in code (ie, works in HTML/CSS rather than Photoshop), and other important factors.

Having recently hired both designers and engineers, I can say with confidence that the pay differential is a hell of a lot more than 7%. Double is absolutely plausible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Talking through her tears on Monday night, Amy said she didn't know if she'd be able to recover from what she considered the worst setback of her professional life. After what happened at Google, she wasn't even sure she could bring herself to interview for another job."

One of my friends lost his job during the dot-com bust. He was married only a few weeks earlier. He was on an H1B and about to get kicked out of the country. He couldn't find a job anywhere because of the bust. He paid money to a body shop to keep his H1B "active", and then he got whatever jobs he could for 2 years, moving around CA taking the shittiest jobs just so that he had money for his family. He went from a software engineer to pumping gas during the midnight shift in Redwood City and getting paid under the table, just so that he would have money. Finally after two years, he got a break and got a job at a big tech company, moved to Austin, and is thriving in his job, made senior manager, and has 3 kids. He suffered great indignities just to survive and to make money and his perseverance paid off, thankfully.

To hear this person say they don't know if they can never interview again because they weren't good enough to join Google, and they would look bad in front of their rich friends, frankly it _sickens_ me. No wonder the hate of Silicon Valley is increasing in these past few years, it's producing people like this that can't take the fact that their feelings were hurt.

<comment><USER11> What we say in the emotional raw state is not what is going to determine our future. Otherwise, I would have given up more times than I can count. :)

And it's not just her feelings that were hurt -- it could have short term negative consequences on her job prospects. "If Google didn't want her, what's wrong with her?"

<comment><USER12> > And it's not just her feelings that were hurt -- it could have short term > negative consequences on her job prospects. "If Google didn't want her, > what's wrong with her?"

If she doesn't know how to spin that, she should get someone to help her out because it's really just a matter of perception. I'm no communications expert but I'd start with "Google wanted engineers," "Google was looking for a different skillset," etc. This is the type of thing that a good recruiter can actually really help with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The following is personal opinion/experience and I do not represent Google, etc.

My experience at Google is that we love hiring women both for SWE roles and PM roles. All three tech leads I've had over 2.5 years have been women, and I've worked with about as many female PMs as male ones. However, we generally hire PMs with a solid technical background (often a CS major or minor), which the author doesn't mention and so I assume does not have. I would be flabbergasted if she wasn't hired because she's a woman.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've grown keenly aware of the gender disparities in tech and it's an issue I care about fixing.

Which is why I want the "tech undervalues non-coders" meme to stop getting dragged into these gender discrimination discussions. It muddies the waters and only serves to discredit the person bringing it up in the eyes of technology people who still need to be convinced that we have a gender discrimination problem.

A similar example I saw recently at ([http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/sex- and-the-startup-men-w...](http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/sex-and-the- startup-men-women-and-work)) put it clearly:

"The roots of the vast gap in power and value between men and women in Silicon Valley begin very early in the life-cycle of a startup, often before the startup officially has employees or executives. For example, in a company like Facebook... women from the beginning of the company did work that had not yet been conceived or compensated as work. Women who casually dated the founders before the company had employees found themselves doing everything from recruiting engineers from their social networks, mediating founder relationships and disputes, providing product feedback, designing social events, and performing emotional and affective labor."

"When startups begin hiring employees, the fact that nontechnical work may have been originally done for free by friends often leads founders to continue to devalue that labor, considering it optional or "fun," perhaps a matter of social obligation, rather than serious and valuable. Engineers become highly prized commodities to hunt and value highly, while labor that isn't technical is often expected to be freely performed by people who may have other jobs at the company (such as administrators) or who may not have any job at the company at all (such as girlfriends and dates). And because this labor often goes underpaid or not paid at all, it also doesn't signify when equity is divided up."

The author of that needs to ask: _why_ can you find people to do the non- coding work for free or cheap, but you can't find people to do the coding for free or cheap? It has everything to do with the supply and demand of skills. Developers are still more scarce than all those other roles. Full stop.

We absolutely need more powerful women in tech -- by letting more women become great coders. Not by pretending coding ability doesn't matter.

<comment><USER15> You're missing out entirely on the point of the article.

The notion is that "women's work" is devalued, and there are all these social reasons women find themselves being underpaid or not paid at all for above and beyond "supply and demand".

It's ultimately shitty that everyone in the company _but_ the designer got to fail upwards and land in cushy jobs while she got $10k and a pat on the head. Did she not put in long hours? Did she not sacrifice her personal life, etc, in a way commensurate with the developers?

You need one designer for every 3 or 4 programmers, but that doesn't mean you still don't need good designers or that their individual contribution is automatically less valuable.

<comment><USER16> _" The notion is that "women's work" is devalued, and there are all these social reasons women find themselves being underpaid or not paid at all for above and beyond "supply and demand"."_

It's an interesting hypothesis, but I haven't seen any data to back it up. The common sense explanation seems like it fits. Work that can be done by lots of people gets lower (or zero) wages. If the problem were _women_ getting underpaid, we'd see the same problem among female developers. Do we?

Designers are worth less in an acquihire. As a result, designers should demand wages that are closer to the market rate than developers do when they work for startups.

<comment><USER15> Data is tricky in these situations.

I doubt anyone collects statistics on acquihires let alone "girlfriends or wives who help out in startups but don't get paid for it", or "HR people who got shafted with useless stock options".

(Female developers being somewhat underpaid is a common enough trope, though)

So, we're left with anecdotes. "Unpaid female work" is an common theme. You've got the MVC article linked above or say this one here [http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/ceo-archetypes-7-joan- of-...](http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/ceo-archetypes-7-joan-of-arc) and I'm reminded of Scott Weiss' post on the disruption his personal life suffered due to this startup ( [http://scott.a16z.com/2014/01/17/success-at-work- failure-at-...](http://scott.a16z.com/2014/01/17/success-at-work-failure-at- home/) ) and tucked away in there is a bit where his Harvard MBA wife had to stay at home to look after the kids.

<comment><USER17> There are plenty of designers who can't code, who are both male and female. Really way too many. Consequently, unless you're beyond extraordinary, demand is low as are the salaries. However, if you're a designer who can code i.e. a front end engineer, you can get a king's ransom regardless of gender.

I've known plenty of designers who aspire to code "one day" but they never do for whatever reason.

I don't doubt that there is gender discrimination and ageism in the industry. However I don't feel that this is a case of one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It sounds like she sort of got a raw deal, IMHO. Although I blame Google less, and more her company. For a company this small I don't think I'd let Google acquire us w/o hiring everyone. Or at least really compensating the one they didn't hire.

Maybe there is more to this story, but at face value, I think this is a failure of leadership to protect the team.

<comment><USER19> _For a company this small I don 't think I'd let Google acquire us w/o hiring everyone._

I doubt you'd get that. As of 2011, Google's pretty firm on regular employees of acquisitions being contractors first, and sub-80 conversion rates happen.

 _Or at least really compensating the one they didn 't hire._

I agree. They should have done that.

I think the founders took a deal that was good for them and failed to make sure it worked for everyone. She got a crappy severance; they got jobs at twice what they'd get under normal terms. Not that it excuses their betraying her, I think they were probably a bit panicked about their own job security.

 _Maybe there is more to this story, but at face value, I think this is a failure of leadership to protect the team._

They saved themselves. You could say that they weren't leaders, then. It's unclear what their other options were.

<comment><USER12> It's typical bad business. At such a small firm especially when the employees are underpaid with the expectation of some large payoff in the future, the management should ensure that there is a positive outcome for all of their employees. Unfortunately, this frequently does not happen. This scenario is similar to when companies sell out for a per share value below the employee stock option strike price and the senior people all have stock so they get paid while all of the option holders get nothing. Or the startup that fired a lot of their employees with unvested options just prior to the ipo announcement.

These things happen and they are upsetting. There are many bad operators who wouldn't think twice about screwing over the people who helped them get where they are. On the other hand, there are folks who will try to do their best to make sure everyone comes out ok and these are the people who you should try to seek out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> >It was seeming proof that even within the happy-go-lucky world of tech start- ups, there are winners and losers, and more often than not, the losers in situations like these are the designers, who are more likely to be female than their engineer counterparts, and whose "soft" skills are seen as less valuable than coding chops.

If a field is dominated by women, the pay tends to be less. Anecdotal, no proof. But this rule of thumb has worked for me. I am often asked to do UI and design stuff. I could be good at it, but I refuse to do it because it shunts me into a lower paid position. I stick to programming and don't allow my male counterparts to make the assumption that I will do their prettifying.

Design work is necessary, and I enjoy my attempts at it on personal projects. If it were my dream job, maybe I would feel differently? I don't know. I just know that as someone who is viewed as "creative", my personal experience is that the stereotype is stunting.

<comment><USER21> Agreed, and that is shrewd thinking, though I'm not sure if it is related to gender. It may be part of it, but I think also design is a more attractive job than coding which is gross and technical, so there are more people who want to do it -> more labor supply -> lower pay.

Same thing with games, tons of people grow up playing them and want to make them -> more supply of workers -> get paid & treated like crap.

<comment><USER22> It is definitely a supply demand thing. Lots of people go to art/design school, and jobs are scarcer.

Also, look at your average consumer/business startup - by the time you get to 10-20 coders, you might have one full-time designer. Maybe. Or a freelancer whom you bring in for a project when you need them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's a bit hard to make sense of this story. Google might not think that her UX/Design talent is a good fit for them (the Design and engineering teams at Google are "separate" from what I've seen). That doesn't say anything about her.

I also don't really think that the part about her rich boyfriend is relevant and it feels a bit weird that the article mentions it. She also sounds very, very negative towards the end of the article. Some of my friends in other sectors have applied to 100 jobs, received one offer and got fired after 6 months because of budget cuts. They still get up every day and try again.

If I was her I would ask why they didn't hire me (feedback is always useful), take the 10k. Travel for a month and get ready to try again. I get that it hurts but working for a startup company the possibility of failure is always around the corner and "selling" to Google and getting some money doesn't sound like the worst way to fail.

<comment><USER24> The article mentioned her boyfriend because:

 _her financial cushion had made it easier for her colleagues to leave her behind.

"Their attitude was, We can leave you with nothing because you're a girl and you have a rich boyfriend," she said._

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Faced with a similar prospect in my small company, the founders agreed (in writing) to set aside a portion of their proceeds (including a portion of gross salary) to ensure that payments were made to anyone on the team who was not hired.

In my opinion, even if your teammate doesn't "need the money", it's important that you express how valuable they have been to you (for even just believing in your journey and sticking through it).

<comment><USER26> A nice gesture like this done before the fact helps mitigate perception problems. The problem is "damaged goods" repulation, its not the "rejection". New hiring managers will silently discriminate against her (surely). By giving your employees something to point to, you are being more responsible in how you do the buyout transaction. I actually don't agree with the view that this is some type of mis=placed "entitlement", because the problem is a real problem regardless of who it impacts. Although she also shouldn't over-worry if she's falling into a hot market with a strong support network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm really dismayed by this story, because it reminds me of too many conversations with young professionals who are stuck in their career because they are not professionally developing out of some inner rage. Quoting:

> "Amy admits she'll "never know" if she wasn't hired by Google because she's > female, because she's not an engineer, or whether there was something else > wrong with her application."

If you go through life believing that any prejudice (sexism, in this case) is dominating your career growth, you will always look for it in the tea leaves, project it onto any situation, and in return invite it. In truth, the person who is prejudiced is you.

You have to live your life assuming good faith unless you have direct evidence of bad faith. You're crippling yourself to assume an ethereal, non-specific, constant prejudice against you because you are putting the locus of control outside yourself.

[http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/AssumeGoodFaith](http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/AssumeGoodFaith) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control)

In fact, in Amy's words:

> "I feel like I have no power, that this happened to me, and it's my fault," > she said. "I feel so betrayed. And, at this point, I don't really feel like > I have it in me to fail again."

It's critical as a professional to believe that the situation is something specific, direct, and within you sphere of influence, so you can look to ways to improve.

In this situation, if you start with the assumption no one was being sexist, it's not that difficult to identify the most probable reason she was not hired and her salary was lower. Google acquihired the engineering team; she was a designer. Therefore, she was not hired.

If you see that as a cause, then it becomes easier to think of ways to improve, such as gaining software development skills or taking on a larger and larger product design roles to make yourself more valuable as an employee. Or just looking for another job.

Of course, they could have been sexist towards her, but the article doesn't provide direct evidence, only Amy's perception of their attitude, which I fully trust she believes is fact even though I also believe she is just projecting.

> "'Their attitude was, We can leave you with nothing because you're a girl > and you have a rich boyfriend,' she said."

The lesson in an nutshell is to never assume prejudice. Only draw that conclusion from direct evidence.

<comment><USER18> _If you go through life believing that any prejudice (sexism, in this case) is dominating your career growth, you will always look for it in the tea leaves, project it onto any situation, and in return invite it. In truth, the person who is prejudiced is you._

For better or worse, disadvantaged minorities always have to consider this. It's probably one of the biggest privileges that white males have in day to day life -- they rarely need to consider if race/gender played a role in any decision they encounter.

There was an interesting experimental study that showed that a white male just released from prison was as likely to get a job callback as a black male with no criminal record [1].

There are typically multiple factors at play for any employment decision, but race and gender loom very large -- large enough that ignoring it is just ignorance.

And note, that the domain matters. Jeremy Lin faced discrimination as a basketball player being Asian. But for most domains, being a white male is preferred.

[1] Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment, Am Sociol Rev. Oct 1, 2009; 74(5): 777–799, [http://www.princeton.edu/~pager/ASR_pager_etal09.pdf](http://www.princeton.edu/~pager/ASR_pager_etal09.pdf)

<comment><USER27> First, not everyone here is a white male.

Second, statistics that measure the state are not direct evidence. Individual cases may or may not fit. There may be statistics that measure a company that demonstrate a bias, but unless you have direct evidence of that, it's better to not burden your mind with that negativity.

Third, you aren't a statistic. You have to keep developing and getting better. Don't internalize the statistical oppression. Internalization is the worst form of oppression.

<comment><USER28> It is incredibly, blindingly privileged to say that internalized oppression is the worst form of oppression. Being oppressed is the worst form of oppression.

And, for people who aren't white men, oppression is a lived reality, not an abstract concept that you can attempt to rationalize away. It is both rational and justified to think that prejudice is a predominant factor in virtually everything, because it is.

Finally, oppression isn't "statistical." The people who cause those statistics have names, faces, and addresses. As do the people who act as their apologists. The personal is the political, but the political is also personal.

<comment><USER29> If this is true why so many homeless are white men? If this is true why being a soldier, the worst job in the world (because amputations and PTSD are no fun) is done by so many white men? Where is the "privilege" you talk about there?

And there is no intrinsic racism against others by white men, where I'm from (Colombia) everyone is brown-ish but there is still a lot of racism against black people, just for being the majority not for being white.

<comment><USER30> What are you talking about. Being a white male is easy mode.

I'm a white male. This shit is awesome. I won the genetic lottery.

Does anyone ever assume that I can't speak English - <USER6>

Does anyone ever assume that I might have body odor - <USER6>

Does anyone ever assume that I am not technical/intelligent before speaking to me - <USER6>

Am I ever physically/sexually harassed - <USER6>

If I move to any high tech friendly city anywhere in North America will I be in a minority and possibly have difficulty finding friends who understand my culture - <USER6>

Do I ever worry about little things like having to search for somewhere special to get my haircut - No (I've heard this is a problem for Black and possibly Asian people, I honestly have no idea)

Every door is open, no doors are closed.

It should be the same way for everybody, but right now it isn't and that is really unfortunate. Is it really too hard to recognize that others have it harder?

[edit - formatting]

<comment><USER29> You should try to start from scratch somewhere else in the US without using your tech/management knowledge, your current money and current friends. I bet you would change your views about the relevance of your skin color.

Is not hard to also see it in statistics: Men are 68% vs Women; and between races White (non-hispanic) is the largest one: [http://homeless.samhsa.gov/ResourceFiles/hrc_factsheet.pdf](http://homeless.samhsa.gov/ResourceFiles/hrc_factsheet.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It may not have been any better for her if she joined. A friend of mine was an evangelist of a startup, acquired by Google for their technology. She was humiliated by having to essentially re-apply for her job and be ejected a few months later. (Incidentally, this woman is an accomplished programmer and project leader, but not quite the C++ rock star that Google looks for).

As for the OP's case - we only have only her side of the story. If the team jettisons one of their own when acquired, it may be that they are contemptible, or that she is and they were happy to get rid of her. Or, possibly both.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't think this has to do anything with Amy being a woman. I personally know about 2 cases where a silicon valley big corp company interviewed employees before an acquisition and let go some of them. Maybe because they are not that important for the job.

</comment><comment><USER33> I can't say I am surprised. Google probably needs about 1 designer for every 50 engineers. They could have given her a year though.

</comment><comment><USER34> The actual link has a lot more comments than the published story [https://www.secret.ly/p/feexnrnpunzjadkhinaegigziy](https://www.secret.ly/p/feexnrnpunzjadkhinaegigziy)

I would love to hear the other side, but I cannot help but think leaving one of your team to fend for themselves is not exactly the act of a standup person.

</comment><comment><USER35> Do acqui-hires go through the same rigorous hiring process as regular hires at Google? I wonder how many engineers that are hired as part of an acquisition would actually pass the infamously hard interviewing process at Google.

<comment><USER19> As of 2011: regular employees convert to contractors (red badges) and have 12 months to prove themselves. Obviously, executives get a sweetheart deal they arguably don't deserve.

<comment><USER36> What are the financial terms? i.e. would people who don't convert lose everything due a a 1 year cliff?

<comment><USER19> That I don't know. I'd hope not.

<comment><USER36> I do know I'd be "orange" or more when negotiating with Google in general, based on this kind of thing. It really is down to the CEO to make sure the whole team gets a fair deal in an exit (not necessarily the _same_ deal, but something as far as possible for each of them).

Where it will really hurt Google is not so much acquihires (where you're doomed otherwise, especially without other options), but when there's any competition. Taking 75% as much money overall but having a great work outcome for everyone for the next 2-6 years is probably worth it, especially if you ever plan to do a startup again.

Which is sad, because Google sounds like an amazing place to work (your concerns for early-career people might be valid, but for senior people, people in infosec, or people at Google Labs, it sounds awesome).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It sucks and I feel for Amy. Then again, she did make 60K a year for period. As a designer. And 10K isn't much but it's enough to buy a few nice things.

Really, I guess I don't feel that sorry. People work their hearts out all over the world for little more than subsistence. Work and business is brutal and full of millions of sad stories.

The level of self entitlement displayed by the "startup culture" is astounding at times.

</comment><comment><USER38> What a ridiculously terrible article.

The company "decided to sell itself to Google as a last resort, after failing to find traction in the market". But the engineers got hired, so probably the product was good but the failure was in marketing, branding, etc. Who was in charge of that? "I did our user experience, our logo, the marketing – all that stuff," she said.

So the article could have been written "Strong technical team makes valuable product, but bad marketing and UI prevents success" and no one would be surprised that the engineers got hired and the marketing & design people didn't.

But that wouldn't fit with the sexism in tech narrative the author wanted, so let's ignore the most significant and obvious facts.

<comment><USER39> Your notion that good programmers = good product is absurd. As is your rush to blame somebody for failing to find traction.

If a startup fails to find traction, there's no clear reason to blame anybody. Most startups do that.

<comment><USER38> I edited my comment several times and I think the message I was originally trying to convey got less clear as a result.

I don't for a moment believe the startup actually failed due solely to the designer. And yet, it's more likely that the designer just wasn't google- quality than libelling google by claiming it was sexism that caused them to hire a few engineers but not the designer from a failed startup.

<comment><USER39> Show me where she libeled Google and claimed it was sexism?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> > "'Their attitude was, We can leave you with nothing because you're a girl > and you have a rich boyfriend,' she said

She wasn't an engineer. Perhaps they wanted engineers. Whats wrong with pointing out she happens to be cared for financially so won't have that to worry about? Its not the reason, its a fortunate circumstance.

Playing the sexism card is in rather poor taste. Did she complain when they took her on board because she suspected there was positive discrimination at play?

Doing 'the logo' and 'all that stuff' is suitably vague. Is she not fortunate to have got away with coining 60k for a lowly role in the first place?

<comment><USER12> I didn't get that. It looked to me like she took 60k at the startup instead of a higher number at a more established company with the expectation that she'd get paid out the difference at the exit. Isn't that the risk/reward expectation of startup employment?

And what's wrong with pointing out her external financial situation is that it is not relevant to the decisions of the business. Is it less wrong to screw over a girl with a rich boyfriend than it is to screw over anybody else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The first time I heard about "Secret" I thought it sounded awful, and assumed it would be full of spiteful gossip and behind-the-back-talking, and decided I'd never use it and would ignore anything I learned that was sourced from it.

Anyway recently a friend showed it to me on their phone and it turns out it's actually full of banal not-interesting-enough-for-twitter observations, obviously made-up half-jokes, and trite glurge nonsense that sounds like it was stolen from my grandmother's email forwards. In a way, this reality is even worse.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'm getting tired of these stories.

If you want to make more money, try to train in and work in a field that makes more money.

<comment><USER43> Relevant:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kZg_ALxEz0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kZg_ALxEz0)

Coffee's for closers.

<comment><USER44> You realize that he's not a positive role model, right?

<comment><USER43> He's not a role model at all. He's not in the original text, and does not appear again in the movie.

It's a talking reality check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > Amy admits she'll "never know" if she wasn't hired by Google because she's > female, because she's not an engineer, or whether there was something else > wrong with her application

Because she's not an engineer. The company folded, the underlying tech may have some value. The branded design? Her years of toil? Did the company have a cleaning person for the office as well?

Someone post this to /r/TumblrInAction already.</comment>


Dev Team Lead: things they didn't tell me when I got promoted - <AUTHOR> https://linearb.io/blog/promoted-from-dev-to-team-lead-8-things-they-didnt-tell-me/ <comment><USER2> "Keep your instincts. Change your behavior." Great point. The best dev leads know what their people are dealing with but respond as a leader versus a hands-on dev.</comment>


China stocks tumble again after premier Li Keqiang fails to mention crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/07/china-stocks-tumble-again-after-premier-li-keqiang-fails-to-mention-crisis

<comment><AUTHOR> Besides the reporting from _The Guardian_ opening this thread, the commentary from _The Economist_ blogs is interesting too for an economic perspective on what is mostly a political story.

[http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/07/chinas-s...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2015/07/chinas- stockmarket-crash)</comment>


The Future of Language - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/24/the-future-of-language/ <comment><USER2> Does anyone know why articles like this, which often seem to involve consulting experts, always count all of China as one language? Aside from the many different languages of China[1], Wikipedia also says that "Chinese"/Hanyu in different regions is mutually unintelligible[2], which as far as I know is the same as the difference between similar languages like Italian and Spanish.

I don't mean this as a middlebrow dismissal -- I am not very knowledgeable about Chinese and I am hoping someone has a good explanation for this. For example, maybe it's the case that everyone speaks their local language _and_ a unified dialect as well; or maybe it's that the vast majority of people all speak one dialect (Mandarin?) such that these articles are only counting those people; or maybe it's some other thing I don't understand.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language)

<comment><USER3> While the different dialects of Chinese (Mandarin/普通话/putonghua being the most common, followed by Cantonese/广东话/Guangdonghua, etc.) sound entirely different spoken, the written character representations of the dialects are essentially the same. That means that the syntax, grammar, and other conventions of written Chinese underpin all spoken dialects. This extends to both written Traditional and Simplified Chinese, which are just two parallel character sets that represent the same fundamental characters (Simplified characters are just simplified versions of the Traditional characters, and were introduced in the 1940's and '50s to promote literacy). So while two people speaking different dialects may not be able to speak to each other because the tones and pronunciations of words are different, they most certainly can communicate by writing with each other because each dialect is just a different vocal representation of the same underlying language.

<comment><USER4> >> So while two people speaking different dialects may not be able to speak to each other because the tones and pronunciations of words are different, they most certainly can communicate by writing with each other because each dialect is just a different vocal representation of the same underlying language.

That's actually not true. Modern written Chinese is pretty much Mandarin Chinese. You can pronounce written Chinese with a non-Mandarin dialect but most of the times that is not how the dialect is spoken, and if you write the spoken form of a non-Mandarin dialect, there is a good chance that a lot of pieces of it won't make sense to someone who doesn't speak that dialect, on top of the fact that most dialects don't have a standardized written form in Chinese Characters. Most people speaking two different dialects can communicate via characters because they have learned written Mandarin.

<comment><USER3> Interesting - thanks for the correction. I have been learning Mandarin for a few years now, and made the assumption that since the accepted writing system was standard nationally (and practiced by all literate Chinese speakers, regardless of regional dialect) that the spoken languages were all underpinned grammatically by the same writing system. As you pointed out, this is not the case.

Adding to what you said (and correct me if I'm wrong here, this is based on some quick research [1]), while written Mandarin is by far the most common - and official - writing system, most dialects have completely different sets (i.e. non-1-to-1 mappings) of words than Mandarin, and many have supplemental character sets that wouldn't make any sense to someone reading Mandarin. The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set, for instance, is a set of characters that are specific to the Cantonese dialect, and don't have close/exact relatives in standard written Mandarin [2]. Additionally, while the grammar of the different dialects seem rather close (similar to the relationships between Romance languages), the number of syllables used to represent vocabulary varies from dialect to dialect, which suggests vastly different etymology between the dialects. What I find particularly interesting is that given these substantial differences in vocabulary, one's native spoken language and one's native written language can be at odds with one another. Perhaps this is mitigated by the fact that spoken Mandarin is so widespread, but I wonder how this affects written communication for those who don't speak Mandarin natively.

[1] [https://www.quora.com/Linguistically-speaking-how-similar- ar...](https://www.quora.com/Linguistically-speaking-how-similar-are-the- various-dialects-of-Chinese)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese)

<comment><USER4> >> most dialects have completely different sets (i.e. non-1-to-1 mappings) of words than Mandarin, and many have supplemental character sets that wouldn't make any sense to someone reading Mandarin

Yes, that is correct. Cantonese is probably the non-Mandarin dialect with the most writing going on, and that is mostly informal writing like facebook, blogs, gossip magazines, although there is some modern literature written in Cantonese characters, wikipedia in Cantonese probably counts as well for more formal writing.

>> The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set, for instance, is a set of characters that are specific to the Cantonese dialect, and don't have close/exact relatives in standard written Mandarin

Yes, though I don't know if there are Unicode code points for all the Cantonese characters. You often see this like o的,o個,o即 instead of 啲,嗰,嘅. I know a lot of people in Hong Kong use Cangjie for character input and a lot of the Cantonese characters don't have (or didn't have) Cangjie mappings.

>> I wonder how this affects written communication for those who don't speak Mandarin natively

When speaking Taiwanese it is common to use Mandarin words for more educated topics or if you don't know the word in Taiwanese just use the Mandarin term. Probably because Taiwanese is not generally used in higher education and there are varying levels of Taiwanese fluency in Taiwan. I would imagine it's similar for a lot of dialects in China since speaking dialects is often discouraged and a lot of younger people abandon their native dialects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It is sort of touched on later in the article, but the first graphic, showing the number of native speakers for each language, isn't very useful. The statistic that better measures the utility of knowing a language is the total number of people with working knowledge of the language, which would boosts the numbers of English, French and Russian dramatically.

I wonder if a better statistic would be number of speakers with working knowledge of a language, weighted by GDP per capita of the countries in which those speakers live. Of course, that assumes the purpose of learning a language is to do business, which is not necessarily true.

<comment><USER6> Very interesting, and can be stated even more strongly. Even if the purpose of learning a language isn't business, the GDP per capita of the target language matters. Countries that are better off have more people with leisure time who you are likely to meet/interact with, and also tend to produce more interesting culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm curious about the discrepancy of the number of Arabic speakers. The article says 467 Million, while Wikipedia states 290 Million [1]

I know that Wikipedia can't be taken as The Truth, but a quick search on Internet seems to get values closer to 200-300M than to 450M (except for Ulrich Ammon, which is the source for the post). It seems a sensible difference, anyone has an explanation?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic)

<comment><USER8> Arabic is not one language, but a family of languages, with "Standard Arabic" serving as an almost artificial lingua-franca, that no one actually can speak natively.

I say almost artificial because it has never been any body's native language at any point in time.

Now, Classical Arabic, theoretically was the native language of certain tribes in the Hijaz region (of modern day Saudi Arabia) some 1400 years ago. Standard Arabic is a _modernized_ version of Classical Arabic. Some vocabulary have almost completely different meanings, and a large number of modern collocations would probably make no sense to the native speakers of Classical Arabic if they were alive today.</comment></comment>


Show HN: How Netflix's Microservices Infrastructure Works - Alex-Potsides https://email@example.com/under-the-hood-how-netflixs-microservices-infrastructure-works-de18acf5d55 <comment><AUTHOR> Note that blog posts can't be 'Show HN' [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

(Sometimes an annoucement of a feature can be Show HN if it better describes what has been build compared to submitting the actual work).

<comment> Alex-Potsides Noted. Thanks for letting me know.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Comics - <AUTHOR> https://bubbl.in/book/intro-by-wenqing-yan/1 <comment><AUTHOR> Heya HN!

We started a webcomics on our modern day cyberpunk situation. Hope you like it!

If you do, subscribe! :-)

Aaaaaaaaaand... it's also open source! : [https://github.com/marvindanig/fisheye-placebo- intro](https://github.com/marvindanig/fisheye-placebo-intro)

</comment><comment><USER2> I just see a black canvas and a bunch of speech bubbles with the word "no". Using Edge.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's odd... it's working _normally_ at the moment.

> I just see a black canvas and a bunch of speech bubbles

FWIS, images aren't loading properly on your machine edge/browser. Can you share a little more detail?

I sense that the browser is somehow preventing cross-origin images from being loaded -- we host it over Github. That seems the most likely explanation but this needs more investigation.</comment></comment>


The five-paragraph fetish - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/writing-essays-by-formula-teaches-students-how-to-not-think <comment><USER2> One page takes you there. If in have to scroll you lost me.</comment>


Greybeard Stories: The Unwise Update - <AUTHOR> http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/TheUnwiseUpdate.html?HN

<comment><USER2> Is the military really that rigid on not questioning your superiors orders?

Assuming that a higher placed always knows better seems to be a pretty weird position, at some point domain specific knowledge starts to apply and you would expect a more bi-directional flow of information.

You might explain the 'why' of something without being asked and follow up with a 'do you foresee any issues with that?' to avoid mistakes like that one in the story.

<comment><USER3> Doctrine in all the major Western militaries is to specify orders in terms of the outcome, and push decision making as far down the chain of command as possible - to the "strategic corporal": <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Block_War>

However there are times when an order really does need to be obeyed immediately without question, because there simply isn't time for anything else. The problem here was the officer didn't know which was which.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems to indicate that there's often a balance between codification and informality. If your codified practices miss something important that _should've_ been formalized (but of course you can't formalize everything), it's sometimes nice if people give enough informal reasons to each other in even routine communication so that it's possible for someone to notice, "wait, _that's_ why you want this?"</comment>


How Baremetrics got its first 100 customers (and thousands in MRR) with Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://baremetrics.io/blog/first-100-customers

<comment><USER2> Thanks for this. You went pretty much against the norm. So on twitter you just sent tweets out about your solution and nothing more?</comment>


Dart 1.6 released, support for deferred loading - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!topic/misc/Ek1EROgTD1Q

<comment><USER2> Another great release, congrats to the team!</comment>


The rise of miniature 'microfactories' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161117-the-rise-of-miniature-microfactories <comment><USER2> Her last big idea, in 2005, was "green steel", using old tires as an input to steelmaking. In practice, the one company using this replaces about 12% - 16% of their coke with old tires. [1] This doesn't replace coke in making pig iron, the first phase of steelmaking from ore and the big user of coke and thus coal. It's just for a fraction of the small amount of coke used in electric arc furnace steel recycling to assist in getting the non-steel "slag" out of the metal. It's more a useful way to get rid of tires than a way to make steel "green".

So there's a history of over-promotion here.

[1] [http://www.smh.com.au/business/carbon-economy/waste- revoluti...](http://www.smh.com.au/business/carbon-economy/waste-revolution-a- boost-for-green-steel-20130512-2jg5w.html) [2] [http://www.worldsteel.org/steel-by-topic/sustainable- steel/c...](http://www.worldsteel.org/steel-by-topic/sustainable- steel/company-case-studies/polymer-injection-onesetel.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> In my observation, the thing that big idea decentralist utopias always forget around manufacturing is supply-chain. Who wants to buy this stuff? Mostly other factories. Where are they located? Mostly in China. Why? Because they're in the same position. The only exceptions seem to be highly skilled design- heavy work where secrecy and control may be priorities (ie. military/space) and very low skilled manual labor pools (ie. many clothing factories) which are now migrating elsewhere (especially Vietnam) due to mainland Chinese wage increases.

You can decentralize 'til the cows come home but if there's no local demand for your product, you're wasting your time.

<comment><USER4> There is also the issue of prototyping; some classes of goods (eg some music parts, gun parts, car parts...) require large amounts of design & experimentation work, and have high enough price points with low enough volume that it's worthwhile to use the same machines you're prototyping on for "mass" production.

Even if the ultimate result is cloneable, volume probably doesn't justify a large factory in China going out of their way to duplicate it. If the design work benefits from tight feedback loops it can be worthwhile to produce locally.

<comment><USER5> But even there, the components are made from the same intermediates as high volume products. "You don't just take sand from the beach to produce a dataprobe", if I may quote a computer game.

The supplies question makes one off products just as dependent on proximity as high volume products. Or maybe even more so: if you set up high volume production, no matter the cost, you will be able to source your components at somewhat acceptable prices anywhere in the world. If you do the same with lower volumes, being close to the existing supply chains that developed around volume buyers makes all the difference in the world.

<comment><USER6> > _" "You don't just take sand from the beach to produce a dataprobe", if I > may quote a computer game."_

Alpha Centaur, great game that I spent countless hours on. I still remember quite a lot of the quotes after listening to those characters mentioning them so many times. If anyone wants some more of the quotes from that game:

[http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/smac.html](http://www.generationterrorists.com/quotes/smac.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > And while the amounts in each phone are small – 0.034g of gold, for example > – they quickly add up when you consider that around 42 million tonnes of > e-waste were generated in 2014 alone, and the UN Environmental Program > estimates that figure is increasing by 3-5% each year.

What are the economics of this?

> In Sahajwalla's vision of the microfactory, pre-programmed automated drones > are used to pick out items such as circuit boards from a pile of smashed > e-waste. These boards are then put into a tiny furnace which uses selective > temperatures to extract the valuable resources, such as copper alloys. The > glass and plastic can also be combined in this high-temperature smelter to > produce silicon carbide nanoparticles, which have a range of industrial > applications.

How?

<comment><USER8> I agree this vision (as stated) is fantasy, but I've often speculated about whether it would be smart to buy up land that was formerly used as landfill. It doesn't generally seem to be considered valuable.

I suppose this is because it is not desirable for property development or agriculture... the killer might be assuming some liability for environmentals but I never investigated that in detail.

An interesting option would be to try and buy just the mineral rights. The seller will probably think you're crazy, and they might be right.

In any case, a landfill operation is close to the reverse of mining, and while the extraction technology one would need isn't here yet, it's hard to think of how you could get greater concentrations of natural resources all in one place. Plus everything is at least close to the surface.

Another major downside I can see is that landfills tend to be too close to built-up areas. People want their trash to go "away", but also they don't want to take it _too_ far. Which then leads to the surprising mental image of landfill "ore" being dug up and transported to a remote processing site.

[this is why I think the author's vision is mostly fiction -- it's hard for most people to imagine the sheer scale that modern resource extraction operations need to be profitable].

The slightly unfortunate part is the "crazy grandpa" image that leaving such a legacy to your descendants creates...

<comment><USER9> In other discussions about this, the point is made that there are some very nasty things buried in those landfills. (I'm certainly no authority) Hazerdous waste, bio-waste, etc.

The mining technology would have to include something to mitigate that. Not just as immediate safety, but what do you do with it once you've dug it up? Or through it?

<comment><USER8> Mining has always been hazardous, both in terms of the materials themselves and the industrial processes involved.

Likewise, most resource extraction creates significant waste problems, whether that is just mountains of tailings or giant pools of arsenic or whatever.

I don't really see any difference (modulo surprising technology of the future). For purposes of discussion, imagine that the waste processing plant is out in the desert, and the waste is run through multiple extraction passes, where it might get dug up and put back in the ground again several times.

Of course, a lot of ore just gets shipped offshore to where processing is cheaper so that could be an option too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love how this article reminded me how I am apparently out of touch with reality and why I should never assume anything I do would be representative of the general public :)

> How many mobile phones have you owned in your lifetime? Given that we > upgrade to a new smartphone on average every 11 months, it's unlikely any of > us could answer this question with any certainty.

Easy: Nokia, Siemens, Nokia, HTC, HTC, Nexus (current) - that's since 2001 with no gap

> The next question is likely to be even harder: what happened to all your old > phones?

Also easy, they're all in a drawer, right here. Except the currently used one, of course.

<comment><USER11> Got my first phone in 1998 - Nokia 5110, since then: Siemens c35i, Nokia 7210, HTC Touch, Samsung Galaxy Note 2 which I use still today.

I never understoon the need to upgrade every year or even every two years, just to have the latest model. I upgrade only when the old one stops working or when new model offers some fundamental improvements like "colorful display" or "android operating system" :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Drones, microfurnaces, sorting robots... Quite a bit of "stuff". Theoretically, the perfect recycling machine would break even on the raw materials used when it has processed the trash equivalent of itself. But that would be Diamond Age level technology, and even then ignoring all energy demands and plain old monetary investment.

In reality, even conventional mining tends to use a lot of "helper materials" that are consumed in the ore processing but do not end up being part of the product that is sold to the next step of the supply chain. Reducing the scale from industrial to laboratory only worsens the efficiency of that material use. Energy efficiency of micro vs macro is a lost case anyway, but for the sake of utopianism I'm willing to not dwell on that to much. "Miracle energy source" would be one of the less fantastic assumptions required to make these microfactories actually rise.

</comment><comment><USER12> It sounds like the big component missing out of this plan is the sorting component; we don't yet have robots capable of looking at a big pile of arbitrary junk and picking out the useful bits, let alone ones capable of intelligently tearing down an iPhone. Once robotics does have that sort of capacity though, I'd bet this sort of recycling scheme would be more likely than other commenters suggest- replacing skilled human labor with robotics has a track record of making unexpected things economically viable.

<comment><USER13> How well does this[1] fit the bill (tearing down an iPhone)?

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc)

<comment><USER12> Fairly well, actually- thanks for pointing that out. I'd be curious to see if this actually gets rolled out in force!

I mentioned iPhones as a random example, of course, since while they probably represent a disproportionate amount of recycled-electronics' value they're still a small fraction of the whole. Ideally, a robot would be capable of figuring out how to break down an unfamiliar device autonomously, without the specialized movements and programming that seems to have gone into that particular example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This sounds a lot like what they wanted to do with the great leap forward in China.

</comment><comment><USER15> This appeared more wishful and idealistic than practical.</comment>


Appeals court hits largest public patent troll with $1.4M fee - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/netapps-1-4m-fee-smackdown-against-patent-troll-holds-up-on-appeal/ <comment><USER2> I was hoping for Intellectual Ventures.

<comment><USER3> Ha ha, exactly. Just like there are a few baseball umpires who are so bad you learn their names (Angel Hernandez, Phil Cuzzi, Joe West), Intellectual Ventures is one of the "companies" that most developers know of for all the wrong reasons. I remember when they sued every maker of "todo list" software.

<comment><USER4> _> I remember when they sued every maker of "todo list" software._

Hmm, I must have missed that one. Link?

<comment><USER3> Turns out I was mistaking Angel Hernandez for Phil Cuzzi...so to speak. It was Channel Intelligence not IV that I was thinking of.

[http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/17/channel-intelligence- sues-j...](http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/17/channel-intelligence-sues-just- about-everyone-who-offers-wishlists/#)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248577](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=248577)

<comment><USER4> Ah I see, thanks. I've been following IV for a while and this didn't seem familiar, so was wondering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> $1,025 per hour for partners, $750 for associates, and $310 for paralegals.

Those are kind of high. Did they actually charge those rates? Or retroactively bumped up the rates once they knew the case was dismissed?

<comment><USER6> Those are fairly standard fees for a big law firm defending these kinds of cases. It's why most companies settle rather than fight cases.

<comment><USER7> Out of curiosity, is this the fee for just one lawyer or there are more than one?

<comment><USER8> Think of them like AWS instances, with a partner being an XL and an associate being an M. Big firms can spin up a lot at once to hammer the other side with legal paperwork, but it starts costing you quite a lot per month. Sometimes there are jobs you really need an XL for for maximum concentrated firepower (like negotiating in person, where someone even slightly better can be worth millions/hr in outcome), but oftentimes a M can be a better fit for the task (paperwork, legal motions, almost everything else).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title alone makes me all "Yissssssssssssss".

</comment><comment><USER10> Good, but I was hoping for Intellectual Vultures to be busted.

</comment><comment><USER11> A good start.

</comment><comment><USER12> >$1,025-an-hour partners.

TIL some people make literally a 100 times what the average person makes.

<comment><USER13> That's what they charge for partners. Normal people easily get charged out for 50 USD per hour. Try calling a plumber to see for yourself.

That doesn't mean that they actually get that much money for every hour worked, since the billed hours have to pay unbillable costs like office rent, admin overhead, taxes etc.

If you are willing to look beyond the rich world: world average GDP per capita is something like 10k USD. At 2000 hours worked per year, that 0.5 USD per hour.

Your `average' person already makes 20 times as much as the actual average person.

(Keep in mind, that the median is lower than the average. Check out [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040))

<comment><USER14> > If you are willing to look beyond the rich world: world average GDP per > capita is something like 10k USD. At 2000 hours worked per year, that 0.5 > USD per hour.

No it isn't. It's $5 an hour, barely under the US minimum wage.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for catching that! Sorry, I obviously can't do arithmetic.

Interesting that the global gdp is that high, actually.

Comparing to the minimum wage is still a bit misleading, since the wage share of GDP is far from 100%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> $1.4 million seems small in comparison to the billions[1] that Microsoft was fined by the EU for bundling certain software with Windows.

Acacia did something that would be considered illegal and exploitative in almost every jurisdiction, whereas bundling a browser straddles a legal gray area. Apple does it OS X and iOS, Google does it on Android & Chromebooks, and nearly every Linux distro does it. On iOS, you can't even use a browser engine other than Safari's WebKit. And none of these companies have gotten into trouble.

It just seems unfair to me that when a company does something slightly unfairly competitive (like Microsoft) they get hit with huge fines, but when a company like Acacia does something that's outright evil and illegal, the fines are a joke.

I do think Microsoft should be paying even bigger fines for patent-trolling Android manufacturers with false patent claims. And a judicial decision or executive act ordering Apple to allow users to install their own software on iOS, and removing the ban on interpreters/browser engines/etc on the App Store would be appropriate.

[1] $794 million in 2003, $449 million in 2006, $1.44 billion in 2008, and $765 million (€561 mil)in 2013 -- a total of over $3.4 billion, all for bundling standard software with Windows that all other OSes also bundle. And this money paid in fines to the European Court goes back into the EU budget. (TBH, this smells strangely as a revenue-generating move by the Commission.) See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp_v_Commission)

<comment><USER16> Saying that Microsoft was fined for "bundling a browser" is like saying that the Feds went after Al Capone because of tax evasion. I hope this was a joke post!

There were plenty of other cases pending against Microsoft, but they were all dropped when George W. Bush came into power. If Gore had won, Microsoft probably would have been broken up, like AT&T before it.

<comment><USER17> Since technology did what it does by enabling unexpected competitors to pass Microsoft, would there have been a purpose beyond the purely political? It's hard to say they have a monopoly on anything now, not even the badwill of the geeks.

<comment><USER16> Microsoft is still as profitable as ever and they have a ton of money and patents. There is still no real competition on the desktop. Linux is used by a tiny number of hardcore enthusiasts. Apple was financially propped up by Microsoft in the early 2000s to maintain the illusion of competition, but their market share is under 15%. The next generation of hardware is going to take away the option of even using Linux... Microsoft has locked down the bootloaders on ARM devices, although they continue to allow Linux to be installed on Intel devices (for now, at least.)

Microsoft may not dominate the areas of cloud computing or smartphones, but those are separate industries from the desktop. And Microsoft continues to pour money into those industries by investing in Azure and Windows RT. They may yet come to dominate those industries if Amazon or Google make a mistake.

Microsoft has also added mandatory spyware (essentially) to their new Windows 10. Some of it can be disabled, but other parts can't. They are also pushing their Windows Store thing. It's still possible to install desktop software without paying Microsoft, but for how much longer?

HN has a real blind spot when it comes to how harmful Microsoft was and continues to be.</comment></comment></comment></comment>